General Comments

Hobbybotics will be the Electrical Engineering Community (EEWeb) featured site of the day on Friday 22 February, 2013. I have been to the site on numerous occasions but was not aware of the user engineering blog section. there is a lot of good resources available for experienced engineers and hobbyist alike. EEWeb also provides a free circuit simulation tool know as PartSim.

“PartSim is a free and easy to use circuit simulator that runs in your web browser.”

A plus for PartSim is the integrated Bill Of Materials (B.O.M) that allows one to assign Digikey part numbers to their designs. I’ll definitely add the site to my “Daily View List” and give the circuit simulator a whirl. Hey, it might save me from some of the design mistakes I tend to discover after I have already sent board files off to be produced.

Been a long time coming but, today I officially updated all of the Hobbyduino boards to Optiboot 4.4 (same bootloader that is on the Uno). I’ll follow this post up shortly with a tutorial on how I did it. For those that cannot wait, you can take a look at my introduction for the Hobbyduino Mini Bootloader ISP Shield. The process to load Optiboot is pretty much the same as that for the Arduino Duemilanove w/ ATmega 328 bootloader except the board type is now ‘Arduino Uno’.

It’s been a while since I actually made a post to my blog. That does not mean I got lazy and forgot all about the blog. I’ve been busy finishing some projects to post but, documentation is the most tedious job to do as you never want to put out garbage. I don’t particularly like to have to go back and edit a project after I have posted it so, I want to make sure that I fully test it before putting it out for others to see. I won’t make any promises but, I do plan to post content more regularly as it’ll also help me organize my projects a lot better than just keeping them stored in folders on my computer.

This is a web blog about me sharing my ideas (sometimes outrageous) based on a “boiling pot” of electronics, programming and manufacturing. Again, I would like to state that some of my ideas may be out there as I love to brain storm, in the physical sense. My ultimate goal is to learn by creating. To do so, I need to actually build stuff instead of thinking about building stuff. I hope that this stuff will become useful to me and to others that may casually browse to my page.

My secondary goal (more like hope) is that others may learn from what information I provide and, maybe, help me learn by providing some information. Some of the projects I present may seem like I am spinning the wheel with the, “Been there, done that before” mentality. But, I do it with a reason–to learn. I intend to build things that I would consider useful, interesting, and low-cost. My thoughts are, why explore something if it will not provide a suitable return (function and knowledge).